1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to the field of distributed computing. More specifically, the present invention relates to a new form of hybrid distributed computing involving one or more humans to assist a computer in solving a task, such as, for example, speech to text conversion, allowing the computer to solve the task in a more efficient manner.
2. Background Information
Traditional computers excel at tasks that are easily expressed by simple algorithms. For example, traditional word processing involves tasks that are easily expressed in terms of programming instructions that are machine executable. The instructions operate to handle user inputs in accordance with specific algorithms that represent the tasks that the computer will perform. For instance, when a text document is scanned by a word processor for spelling errors a computer processor executes specific instructions that result in verification whether user inputs conform to specific pre-determined character patterns, producing outputs to the user indicating where there are mismatches between user inputs and the pre-determined character patterns. There are many similar examples. In each, a computer processor uses simple algorithms to do the processing.
However, there are many tasks that are difficult for a computer processor to perform, even if many computer processors are combined in a distributed computer network or some other computer architecture. Such tasks include, among others, speech to text conversion, speech recognition, image comparison, and music comparison. While it may be a straightforward task for a human to describe the differences and similarities between two pictures, for example, automating the same task on a computer is overly complex and can appear insurmountable. There are a variety of reasons for this, but there tend to be three major underlying reasons. First, there is not an efficient way of representing human knowledge in a form that computers can understand and use. Second, existing algorithms for many of these tasks take so long to execute on a computer that the algorithms are rendered only marginally useful. Third, there is insufficient understanding as to how the human brain processes information to make it possible to easily transfer these processes to computers.
Finding solutions to these underlying issues has been the focus of artificial intelligence research for many years. However, research and development has been directed to improving the algorithms used by computer processors to complete various tasks the have been desirable but difficult to automate, increasing the performance capabilities of the computer processors themselves, and optimizing computer architectures by using multiple computer processors. While advances have been made, the three underlying issues above have not been satisfactorily addressed.
Thus, better methods and apparatuses are needed to help solve the type of problems that tend to be almost trivial for humans but difficult to automate using computers.